“Summer,” terracotta via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/207350?utm_source=Pinterest&utm_medium=pin&utm_campaign=summer

1.“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk roses and with eglantine.

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

And there the snake throws her enameled skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.”

William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

2.“…he drank a bottle of the scent of a summer evening, imbued with perfume and heavy with blossoms, gleaned from the edge of a park in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, dated 1753.”

Patrick Süskind, “The Perfume”

All color flowers in full bloom, canopy of leaves, carpet of grass, bees swarming, the sun oozing heat lavishly – wherever I look, I see bountifulness, I feel how life peaks in me, but how also summer weariness and sweet sensual confusion descend upon me. I am all smell. That reminds me of Christopher Moltisanti, a character from “The Sopranos,” who said he “got high off the smell of popcorn at Blockbuster.” Well, I do find all the collective aromas of the summer intoxicating; I keep catching myself wanting to smell everything around me, whilst imbibing on the hot air. I pick up The Healing Power of Trees: Spiritual Journeys through the Celtic Tree Calendar by Sharlyn Hidalgo, which is one of those effortless reads that keep me nodding and smiling lightly all the time. “I want to be able to understand the novel half-drunk on rosé,” wrote a critic from The New Yorker in an article recommending perfect summer reads. This is it but without losing the depth. Hidalgo’s book is not a scholarly work, but it does have enormous spiritual scope, lots of intuitive wisdom and was written with a true passion for the subject. I appreciate her ability to weave together various cultural traditions such as Celtic, Greek and Egyptian myths, astrology and the runes. Recently, the most exciting plant I have been checking upon in my immediate neighborhood has been the vine (below is a low-quality amateur snapshot I took of it). According to Hidalgo, on 11 July Celtic month of the vine started and will last until August 7. The guides and totems of this month are Lion, Dionysus, the Green Man, Pan, sylphs, nymphs, elves and fairies, the sun god Lugh, Strength card of the tarot, Sekhmet, Kuan Yin, and all mother aspects of the goddess (mother earth offering her bounty for the harvest).

Martin Schongauer (German, c, 1435/50-1491), Shield with Stag Held by Wild Man. Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A few glasses of wine bring a feeling of warm gregariousness, loosen ego boundaries, open the heart and endow with a feeling of expansiveness. In a further stage, imbibing on wine may result in ecstatic frenzy, in the likelihood of the female followers and priestesses of Dionysus – the Maenads, whose name signified “the raving ones.”

Wine brings forward the deepest emotions by dissolving the boundaries that hold us back from full self-expression. Hans Biedermann writes this on the symbolism of wine in his Dictionary of Symbolism:

“The custom of intemperate drinking, in various cultures that revered Dionysus, was part of a religious tradition and was believed to join mortals with the god of ecstasy. Wine supposedly could break any magic spell, unmask liars (“in vino veritas”), and slake the thirst even of the dead when it was poured out as a libation and allowed to seep into the ground. Called ‘the blood of the grape, wine was often closely linked symbolically with blood, and not only in the Christian Eucharist. Poured out as a libation, it could replace blood sacrifices for the dead.”

Bacchantes (Maenads) dancing

In John’s gospel, the very first miracle Christ performs was turning water into wine. This miracle underscored the ambivalent significance of wine, as Juan Eduardo Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols aptly noted, wine pertains both to fecundity and sacrifice. It is a symbol of life in its fullness, and life in its fullness must encompass death and suffering. The vine will not produce good quality wine without ample sun: almost no other plant channels the vigor of the sun in such a marked way. But the height of the summer carries the seeds of death within, symbolized by the harvesting scythe. Sharlyn Hidalgo writes:

“The idea of the sacrament of the last supper of Christ was originally a Dionysian ritual wherein women ate a piece of bread shaped like him (representing his body) and drank wine (his blood). Through this ritualized consumption, the women took in and absorbed the wild, potent power of nature. The ancient Greeks used tools resembling T-squares to cultivate grapevines. Later, these Tau crosses morphed into the structure adopted by the Romans for crucifixion.”

Celtic cross (Celtic art is said to have imitated vine)

Quite a free leap in associations, but I appreciate it. Christ said of himself that he was the vine, while his disciples were the branches. He was the one who gave life to his followers. He poured his divine substance into them. In medieval art, the cross and the tree of life were both represented as grapevines. Saint Hildegard von Bingen said that wine was endowed with the mysterious and secret vital force (viriditas). The poet Dylan Thomas understood viriditas perfectly,  because he knew that life force and death force are essentially the same; in one of his most wonderful poems he wrote: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age;/ that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer.”

From the point of view of the soul, the miracle work of wine endows us with wings of fertile creativity. This creativity sometimes seeks to destroy, for example by dissolving any boundaries or barriers in order to claim a wider territory on grounds of the psyche. The creative spirit of the season was best captured by the genius of Shakespeare in his Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

Paul Gervais, “Folie de Titania”

I remember seeing it many years ago in the theater and being completely overpowered by its Dionysian message of loosening of boundaries, and an invitation to unbridled revelry. I remember being struck by the impression that I was being exposed to an unlimited geyser of creative force. Summer is often the time taken off from our everyday, constraining social roles. As the character in Shakespeare’s play, we are invited to frolic around in the woods governed by freedom giving divine laws of the fairies.

Jozef Mehoffer, “Strange Garden”

Gustave Moreau, “The Birth of Venus”

If our exact time of place and birth is like a lodestar to interpreting our qualities and our destiny, it must make a lot of sense to look closely at the birth of Venus and relate what we find to her archetypal significance. She has a most extraordinary birth tale, after all. At the beginning of time, the sky god Uranus and the earth goddess Gaia were locked in never ending lovemaking. Yet there was no happiness, for she was groaning under the oppression of constant pregnancies as Uranus chased all the offspring back into her womb. In desperation, she gave a white sickle to her son Kronos, who castrated his father and threw his testicles into the sea:

“Earth took into herself the bloody drops that rained down. Within a year she gave birth to the powerful Erinyes, the Furies. … From the immortal flesh that fell into the surging sea there arose in time a white froth, or aphros. Inside the foam was nurtured a lovely girl. First she floated toward holy Kythera, and then to Cyprus pounded by the sea. Out she stepped from the waves, a queenly beautiful goddess, and around her slender feet fresh grass sprouted.” (Martin)

“Circles formed on the surface of the water, and one of them was edged with white foam. From the middle rose Aphrodite, together with her first serving maids, Apate and Zelos, Deceit and Rivalry.” (Calasso)

Dissecting the myth, which Liz Greene is particularly good at, it is worth pointing out that Kronos is “not an independent masculine principle, but rather the masculine side of the generative principle over which the Mother presides.” He is associated with the yearly ritual of king sacrifice, whose purpose was to “fertilise the earth and renew the crops.” Right at the beginning, as it appears, the principle of Aphrodite/Venus and the principle of fertility go hand in hand. Other Venusian principles in plain sight would be: conflict, strife, violence, which eventually beget breathtaking beauty and harmony. Furthermore, Aphrodite seems to combine celestial and terrestrial aspects in her archetypal make-up: she has the Uranian disembodied, abstract aestheticism and perfection coupled with an equally strong chthonic, carnal and sensual aspect. By standing up against the father, the titan Kronos made a necessary step in his individuation process. When the principle of Venus is activated, families may get shattered, which will awaken the Furies (Erinyes). There is blood and suffering at the core of Beauty, it seems.

Odilon Redon, “The Birth of Venus”

As progeny of a primordial god, Aphrodite is older than the Olympians. She has enormous generative power at her disposal, and is a solar (the Golden One) rather than lunar deity. As Venus she competes in her brightness with the sun. Sworder remarks:

“…the phallus of the sky god is the sun and the saw toothed stone which Cronus takes to it is the jagged ridge of the western horizon, and the very moment of excision is that lovely moment as the sun sinks slowly out of sight beneath the world’s edge. Then the western sky is reddened by bloody member till in the midst of it appears the Evening Star.

…

For as star she is seen to stand above the sun after he has sunk beneath the western horizon, as she stands above him before he rises in the east.”

By the same token, Friedrich, quoted by Greene talks of her “sunlit sexuality” – she unashamed, usually portrayed nude, as opposed to other more modest goddesses. Her incarnation is fully blownl: she openly chooses mortal men as lovers, and does not punish their desires as Artemis or Hera did. Liz Greene quotes Paul Friedrich:

“The drives of sexuality are natural; on the other hand, sophisticated love-making is highly cultural. Aphrodite mediates between the two, ‘puts them together’. Or, better, she does not make them identical but interrelates them and makes them overlap to a high degree. To put it yet another way, we can agree that she is a ‘goddess of rapture’ but ought to recognise that this rapture harmoniously blends natural and cultural ingredients.”

William Blake Richmond, “Venus and Anchises”
“Yet in turn Aphrodite laughed at them and boasted of how she had driven gods to mate with women, but never herself had wanted a mortal’s bed. Zeus decided he’d change that. He filled Aphrodite with sweet longing for Anchises, who lived in the rugged uplands of Mt. Ida near Troy. He was a handsome young man with a common trade: herding cattle. One day she was sitting on Olympus, assured of her powers, smugly looking over the world, when she noticed him. That was all it took. Aphrodite instantly began to feel the pangs of desire for this unsuspecting youth. She hurried to Paphos and her temple there, filled with the scent of cypress. She gently closed the shining doors of the inner chamber and undressed, bathed luxuriantly, then clothed herself (with the help of the Graces) in a gown permeated with the most alluring perfumes. Then she rushed north toward Troy, striding high above the clouds, until she set herself down on Mt. Ida. The place was well known as “mother of beasts,” and as soon as she set foot there, they came out to greet her. Gray wolves that fawned at her feet, lions with glaring eyes, bears, leopards. Aphrodite was delighted seeing them, and by her very presence she infused them with the joyous urge to love. Two by two the animals went to lie and mate in the shadowy woods.”
Richard P. Martin

Uranian blood shedding finds its reflection in the two most typical Venusian symbols – the apple and the rose. They are united by the sensual symbolism of the color red. In this connection, Sworder offers his own take on the symbolism of the birth of Aphrodite:

“Red are our lips and nipples and our most private parts, reddest when closest to the consummation of love. Then they distend and bloom with the redness of blood. This is the blood shed by Cronus when he castrates his father Uranus and the phallus falls into the sea. The phallus is the sun which froths and colors the white cloud and the star of the goddess appear standing over its redness.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Red Hills with White Shell”

Among its many significations, an apple seems to bring to mind the infamous “apple of discord.” Love can bring harmony and satisfaction of desire, but just as often it causes misery, jealousy, rivalry and all sorts of destructive passions. Roberto Calasso ingeniously links Aphrodite with Ananke – the goddess of necessity. While Ananke, together with Kronos, symbolizes the precision of karmic laws, with their austerity and relentlessness, Aphrodite seems to embody “a rebellion of lightness.” To quote Calasso with his uncanny precision:

“Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against the precision of the law, which at that time was referred to as pondus et mensura, “weight and measure.” A vain rebellion, but divine. Kronos’s chains become Hephaestus’s golden web. The gods know that the two imprisoning nets are the same; what has changed is the aesthetic appearance. And it is on this that life on Olympus is based. Of the two, they prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke’s inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her ‘many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.’ Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world. Worn by Aphrodite, the girdle becomes both splendor and deceit. But perhaps this was precisely what the Olympians wanted: that a soft, deceiving sash should cover the inflexible bond of necessity.”

Our Venusian encounters are sealed with fatedness. Lightness quickly and imperceptibly becomes heaviness. Consequences weigh on lovers with Ananke’s unforgiveness.

The cycle of Venus, Detail from James Ferguson’s, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, 1799 ed., plate III, opp. p. 67, via http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/venus.html

In astrological symbolism, Venus relates to the golden ratio – the measurable aspect of beauty. Nobody has expressed the beauty of the birth of Venus in a more outstanding fashion than Rilke in his poem “The Birth of Venus,” in Edward Snow’s translation:

“In the morning after that night which fearfully

has passed in outcry, tumult, uproar,—

the sea split open once again and screamed.

And as the scream slowly closed again

and from the sky’s pale light and brightness fell back into the mute fishes’ chasm—:

the sea gave birth.

From first sun the hair-froth shimmered

on the wide curl of wave, on whose lip

the girl stood—white, wet, confused.

As a blade of new green leaf stirs,

stretches, uncoils itself and slowly opens,

her body unfolded into cool sea-air

and into untouched early morning breeze.

Like moons the knees rose brightly

and ducked into the cloud­ rims of the thighs;

the calves’ slender shadows retreated,

the feet flexed and grew luminous,

and the joints came alive like the throats

of drinkers.

And in the hips’ chalice lay the belly,

like a young fruit in a child’s hand.

Within its navel’s narrow cup was all

the darkness that this bright life contained.

Beneath it the small wave rose lightly

and lapped continuously toward the loins,

where now and then there was a silent ripple.

But translucent and yet without shadow,

like a birch stand in early April,

warm, empty, and unhidden, lay the sex.

Now the shoulders’ quick scales stood already

in perfect balance on the upright body,

which rose from the pelvis like a fountain

and fell hesitantly in the long arms

and more swiftly in the hairs’ cascades.

Then very slowly the face went past:

out of downtilted darkness

into clear, horizontal upliftedness.

And behind it the sharp closing of the chin.

Now, with the neck stretched like a ray of light,

and like flower-stalks in which the sap rises,

the arms too stretched out like necks

of swans, when they are searching for the shore.

Then into this body’s dark dawning

came the first breath like morning wind.

In the vein-trees’ tenderest branches

a whispering arose, and the blood began

rushing louder over its deep places.

And this wind increased; now it plunged

with all its might into the newborn breasts

and filled them and crowded into them,-

so that like sails full of distance

they drove the light girl toward the shore.

And thus the goddess landed.

Behind her,

as she strode swiftly on through the young shores,

all morning the flowers and the grasses

sprang up, warm, confused,

as from embracing. And she walked and ran.

But at noon, in the heaviest hour,

the sea rose up once more and threw

a dolphin on that selfsame spot.

Dead, red, and open.”

Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus”

References:

Roberto Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Kindle edition

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, Kindle edition

Richard P. Martin, Myths of the Ancient Greeks, Kindle edition

Reiner Maria Rilke, New Poems, Kindle edition

Roger Sworder, Science and Religion in Archaic Greece: Homer on Immortality and Parmenides at Delphi, Kindle edition

1.“The unconscious can be reached and expressed only by symbols, and for this reason the process of individuation can never do without the symbol.”

Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works Volume 13, “Alchemical Studies,” section 44

2.“What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right, without our becoming any the wiser: indeed, we can only open up the opposition again. Here only the symbol helps, for, in accordance with its paradoxical nature, it represents the “tertium” that in logic does not exist, but which in reality is the living truth. So we should not begrudge Paracelsus and the alchemists their secret language: deeper insight into the problems of psychic development soon teaches us how much better it is to reserve judgment instead of prematurely announcing to all and sundry what’s what. Of course we all have an understandable desire for crystal clarity, but we are apt to forget that in psychic matters we are dealing with processes of experience, that is, with transformations which should never be given hard and fast names if their living movement is not to petrify into something static. The protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but—and this is perhaps just as important—it also brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels.”

Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works Volume 13, “Alchemical Studies,” section 199

C.G.Jung Institute, Zurich, photo taken by me last month

Wilhelm Kotarbinski, “Water Nymph”

“She shook the bright drops from her hair

And gazed upon the anchorite;

To look upon her form so fair

The good monk trembled with affright.

And he beheld her from afar

With head and hand strange signals make,

Then swifter than a shooting star

Dive back into the silent lake.”

Alexander Pushkin, “Rusalka”

We do not have any written records of Slavic mythology; sadly, we have to make do with second-hand accounts and archaeological findings. As much as I am fascinated by Greek and Egyptian mythology, my roots are Slavic, and consequently any exposure to the Slavic lore has a visceral effect on me, not comparable to anything else. Stories of water nymphs, mermaids and sirens are fascinating, but none of them bear quite the same imprint on my unconscious as the stories of the rusalki (Slavic water nymphs, plural of rusalka). Recently, I have come across a great book by Joanna Hubbs Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. One of its section is dedicated to the rusalki lore. In the nineteenth century, these mythological creatures were vilified as death demons, but for ancient Slavs they were predominantly kind, though powerful and sometimes feared, nature spirits. They played a key role in pagan fertility rituals. Their predecessors were called bereginy (bereg means ‘shore’) and connected water and earth in their cult. Their sacred tree was the birch. The later rusalki or vily were believed to live in water and also on land and in trees; they were half women – half fish or half women – half birds. Hubbs refers to them as “spinners” who regulated “human and animal fertility, the cycle of the seasons, the moon, and the weather.” As it is in Rusalka, the famous opera by Antoni Dvorak, rusalki were usually part of a group of mysterious maidens – daughters of a sea or bird king. Their roots are very archaic, says Hubbs:

“Every incarnation of the water nymph suggests the archaic image of the bird-headed transformational goddess who accompanies humanity from the period of the hunt to that of horticulture, herding – and warfare. She is the goddess who creates parthenogenetically by bringing moisture to the earth from below and above, unaided by male consorts. She is one yet multiple, chooses her mate like the shamanic Mistress of Animals, and confers power (military or otherwise) on the male, whom, like the Great Goddess of the Neolithic, she then destroys. She is virginal like Artemis, and yet the giver of life and death.”

Walter Crane, “Swan Maidens”

The rusalka was portrayed as half-bird or half-fish (sirin), sometimes with a lion or a horse, sometimes as “a dragon or lion-tailed creature with the wings of a bird.” Other animals strongly connected with her were the deer and the snake. Her hair looked like entangled snakes – combing it produced rain, called “the milk from heaven.” She was the goddess of the sun, the moon and the rain, fertility, renewal and rebirth, which was symbolized by the snake shedding its skin and the deer shedding its antlers. As birds, rusalki rode on clouds to direct the rains. Floods were caused by too energetic combing of their long serpent tresses. They had under their dominion phases of the moon and the production of winds. Continues Hubbs:

“Artifacts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries found around Kiev show that the Slavic bereginy, like the Russian rusalki, were emulated in their moisture-making functions by young girls, whirling in long-sleeved blouses,… who played the part of rainmakers, bringers of fertility. The very name for ‘girl’ in Russian, deva, suggests linguistic ties with Indian and Persian religious and mythological figures of feminine divinity. … Div or deva in Sanskrit means ‘light’ and ‘pure.’”

Arthur Rackham, “The Rhine Maidens”

While reflecting on this etymology, a thought occurred to me. This lightness and purity of the archetypal feminine means that rusalki, as well as their mermaid and water nymph sisters, stand for the forces of the unconscious struggling to become conscious. In Dvorak’s opera, the title-character falls in love with a prince and decides to accept human form for him. The story does not end well, though the characters learn the value and power of true love. There seems to be a mortal danger present in crossing the line from the unconscious to consciousness. Paradigms are not shifted peacefully but rather in tumultuous birth pangs. This is beautifully expressed by Dane Rudhyar in his interpretation of the Sabian Symbol for 29 Leo (A MERMAID EMERGES FROM THE OCEAN WAVES READY FOR REBIRTH IN HUMAN FORM):

“KEYNOTE: The stage at which an intense feeling­ intuition rising from the unconscious is about to take form as a conscious thought.

The mermaid personifies a stage of awareness still partially enveloped by the ever­ moving and ever elusive ocean of the collective Unconscious, yet already half formulated by the conscious mind. Any creative thinker or artist knows well the peculiar mixture of elation and anxiety characterizing such a stage. Will the intuitive feeling fade away reabsorbed into the unconscious, or will the inexpressible realization acquire the concreteness and expressible form of a concept or a definite motif in an art form? This fourth symbol in the thirtieth five­fold sequence suggests that the fire of desire for concrete and steady form burns at the root of all techniques of self-­expression. An unconscious energy archetype is reaching toward consciousness through the creator, as cosmic Love seeks tangible manifestation through human lovers. The whole pre­human universe reaches eagerly to the human stage of clear and steady consciousness. It is this great evolutionary urge, this elan vital, which is implied in this symbol of the mermaid seeking human incarnation — the YEARNING FOR CONSCIOUS FORM AND SOLIDITY.”

Odilon Redon, “Mermaid”

As our culture progressively divorced itself from its archetypal bedrock, so did the meaning of rusalki and their Greek mythological counterparts transition, stressing now their destructive powers, luring men into their deaths. Unwanted and ignored, they had to exercise their powers from the underworld (the unconscious). The denigration of unconscious powers always ends in a horrible backlash. What was suppressed is now rising with an upsurge. It looks like the magical powers of the feminine have been finding their way into the collective consciousness. We are culturally ready to be reinitiated into the deepest mysteries of Her nature.

Apollo of Mantua
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_of_Mantua

1.“I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself, and knows it is divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine, is mine,
All light of art or nature; – to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn of Apollo”

2.“In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven strings of his lyre were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet, given mystical significance and used for therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, ….and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.”

Robert Graves, “Greek Myths”

Jacopo de’ Barbari, “Apollo and Diana,” engraving, via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/360380

3. “Coronis was washing her feet in Lake Boebeis. Apollo saw her and desired her. Desire came as a sudden shock, it caught him by surprise, and immediately he wanted to have done with it. He descended on Coronis like the night. Their coupling was violent, exhilarating, and fast. In Apollo’s mind the clutch of a body and the shooting of an arrow were superimposed. The meeting of their bodies was not a mingling, as for Dionysus, but a collision.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

As nothing can surpass the radiance of the Sun, so no other Olympian god was perceived as more radiant than the superior and grandiose Apollo. Liz Greene calls him “an image of loftiness of spirit,” Walter Otto “the manifestation of the divine amidst the desolation and confusion of the world.” He bestows grace and sublimity even on the most godforsaken places. It was exactly so with Delos, where he was born. Roberto Calasso wrote that it was “a hump of deserted Rock, drifting about the sea like a stalk of asphodel.” Yet, this barren piece of rock was surrounded by swans as if waiting for the miracle about to occur. Leto had been running from the wrath of Hera, who, jealous of Zeus, had forbidden her to give birth on stable earth. A floating poor island of Delos gained a lot from being the birthplace of Zeus’ favorite son. Calasso:

“Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom. Even the water in the river turned to gold and the leaves on the olive tree likewise. And the gold must have stretched downward into the depths, because it anchored Delos to the seabed. From that day on, the island drifted no more.”

Delos temple, white lions, via Wikipedia

Apollo, the Sun god, has been likened to no less than the Holy Grail by Liz Greene. He is the light of pure divinity of the Jungian Self that is possessed by each of us. He is the inner jewel of royalty that can shine on any desolate landscape and conquer the direst of circumstances. He is the spiritual centre of gravity; he is what sustains us when all the other modes of support have failed. Calasso calls him “unnatural,” “serene,” “abstracted,” looking down on the world, with his “eyes … elsewhere, as if gazing at an invisible mirror, where … (he finds his) own images detached from all else.”

Where there is so much blinding light, the shadow must be deep and equally enormous. Apollo’s dark side is his deadliness, his vicious competitiveness, and utter lack of forgiveness. His is the power that obliterates whatever came before it.  As he is a master archer, death by his hand comes swiftly and unexpectedly. The Homeric hymn to Delian Apollo begins with a startling scene showing the gods frightened of Apollo:

“I will remember and not be unmindful of Apollo who shoots afar. As he goes through the house of Zeus, the gods tremble before him and all spring up from their seats when he draws near, as he bends his bright bow.”

Via http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D3

Albrecht Dürer, “Poynter Apollo”, holding a bow and an orb, via http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/63.212

He was a conqueror in love, too, though with varied success. His first love was the aloof nymph Daphne. As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses, “the smitten god went up in flames until his heart was utterly afire, and hope sustained his unrequited passion.” And in a further brilliant passage, “admonished by his own passion, he accelerates, and runs as swiftly as a Gallic hound chasing a rabbit through an open field.” According to Graves, the myth of Daphne metamorphosing into a laurel tree to escape the hot pursuit of Apollo refers to “the Hellenic capture of Tempe, where the goddess Daphoene (‘bloody one’) was worshiped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads.” Apollo and a new solar religion took over all major mother earth shrines with the most famous one at Delphi (a subject of my next post).

Bernini, “Apollo and Daphne”

I admire Roberto Calasso’s perspicacity when he observes that in fact Apollo did not want to possess Daphne. This aloof god was after the idea of Daphne, her divine essence, and to him her worth was embodied in a symbol she left behind – a laurel leaf that he made into a poet’s crown. The Greek word “nymphólēptos “- “possession” comes from the word Nymph. Apollo made extensive use of archetypally feminine trance and possession states in all of his major oracles. He took the wild young girls from Helicon to train and cultivate their skills. The Greeks believed that he imposed the laws of civilization, divine order and measure upon the wild chaos – thus the Muses and Art were born. In the Homeric hymn to Pythian Apollo, summarized by Graf, “As soon as he enters the assembly, ‘the minds of the immortals turn to lyre and song’, and the Muses sing a hymn about gods and men. ‘The fair-tressed Graces and joyful Seasons, with Harmony, Youth, and Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus, hold hands by the wrist and dance’, and Artemis, Ares, and Hermes join them. ‘But Phoibos Apollo plays on the lyre, stepping fine and high.’” Apollonian mousika was an ultimate expression of beauty and harmony; it could still the most turbulent and confused hearts.

The songs performed by and for Apollo were paeans, which also connect with Apollo’s healing powers (the subject of my future article). Paeans, as Graf describes, were sung “before battle or after victory, at the beginning of a symposium, or before any risky undertaking, such as setting sail or, in comic parody, going to court.” They were also sung at weddings, “yet another uncertain beginning.” Apollo was seen as the Averter of Evil addressed by paeans in situations of danger and uncertainty. In a beautiful Orphic hymn to Apollo we read:

 “You make everything bloom

with your versatile lyre,

you harmonize the poles.”

Gustave Moreau, “Apollo Receiving the Shepherds’ Offerings”

Sources:

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Kindle edition

Fritz Graf, Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World), Kindle edition

Robert Graves, Greek Myths

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, Kindle edition

Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin, Kindle edition

The Orphic Hymns, translated by Apostolos N Athanassakis, Kindle edition

Self Portrait

“Was it true that, according to her final wishes, the ashes of the Polish-Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka were dropped from a helicopter by her daughter Kizette into the crater of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl? What an Olympian, cataclysmic, magnificent way for the woman to say goodbye to this world, a woman who, as her paintings testified, knew not only how to paint but how to enjoy herself, an artist whose fingers imparted an exalted and at the same time icy lasciviousness to these supple, slithering, rounded, opulent nudes who paraded before his eyes: Rhythm, La Belle Rafaela, Myrto, The Model, The Slave. His five favorites. Who said that art deco and eroticism were incompatible? In the 1920s and 1930s, this Polish-Russian woman with the tweezed eyebrows, burning, voracious eyes, sensual mouth, and crude hands populated her canvases with an intense lechery, icy only in appearance, because in the imagination and sensibility of an attentive spectator the sculptural immobility of the canvas disappeared and the figures became animated, intertwined, they assailed, caressed, united with, loved, and enjoyed one another with complete shamelessness. A beautiful, marvelous, exciting spectacle: those women portrayed or invented by Tamara de Lempicka in Paris, Milan, New York, Hollywood, and in her final seclusion in Cuernavaca. Inflated, fleshy, exuberant, elegant, they proudly displayed the triangular navels for which Tamara must have felt a particular predilection, as great as the one inspired by the abundant, succulent thighs of immodest aristocrats whom she stripped only to clothe them in lechery and carnal insolence. … He slowly turned the pages of the book, barely stopping at the mannered aristocratic men, with blue tubercular circles under their eyes, pausing at the splendid, languid female figures with shifting eyes, hair as flat as helmets, scarlet nails, upright breasts, majestic hips, who almost always seemed to be writhing like cats in heat.

…

He was ecstatic over these beautiful damsels decked out in low-cut, transparent dresses, gleaming jewels, all of them possessed by a profound desire that struggled to become manifest in their enormous eyes. ‘To go from art deco to abstraction, what madness, Tamara,’ he thought. Though even the abstract paintings of Tamara de Lempicka exuded a mysterious sensuality.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, “The Discreet Hero”

“Girl with Gloves”

“Surrealist landscape”

“Coronis was pregnant by Apollo when she found herself attracted to a stranger. He came from Arcadia, and his name was Ischys. A white crow watched over her. Apollo had told the bird to guard the woman he loved, ‘so that no one might violate her purity.’ The crow saw Coronis give herself to Ischys. So off it flew to Delphi and its master to tell the tale. It said it had discovered Coronis’s ‘secret doings.’ In his fury, Apollo threw down his plectrum. His laurel crown fell in the dust. Looking at the crow, his eyes were full of hatred, and the creature’s feathers turned black as pitch. Then Apollo asked his sister Artemis to go and kill Coronis, in Lacereia. Artemis’s arrow pierced the faithless woman’s breast. … Before dying, Coronis whispered to the god that he had killed his own son too. At which Apollo tried to save her. In vain. His medical skills were not up to it. But when the woman’s sweet-smelling body was stretched on a pyre high as a wall, the flames parted before the god’s grasping hand, and from the dead mother’s belly, safe and sound, he pulled out Asclepius, the healer.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

Apollo

“When he promised to resuscitate the dead son of king Minos, Glaucus, Asclepius retreated into the woods in order to think about a cure. A snake wound itself around his staff; angered at being disturbed, he killed it, but then observed another snake bringing an herb and reviving its dead companion. He used the same herb to cure Glaucus, adopted the snake as his sacred animal, and made the staff with the snake his symbol.”

Fritz Graf, “Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World)”

The rod of Asclepius

When grown up, Asclepius became the best physician that ever existed. Carried away by his success, however, he forgot the limits that Zeus had set to mortal men: he tried to resuscitate the dead. Zeus killed him with his lightning, restoring the cosmic order which Asclepius threatened.

Fritz Graf, “Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World)”

Asclepius, a healer, a redeemer, a son who by his tender devotion atoned for his father’s haughtiness and hubris, may be the most sublime figure of the Greek pantheon. Similarly to Chiron, who raised him, Asclepius, the “unceasingly gentle”, bridged the gap between nature and culture, as Fritz Graf put it, by connecting the material world of the sense with the abstract world of the divine mind. Always accompanied by his daughters, most notable of whom were Hygeia and Panacea, he redeemed the feminine violated by his father and other prominent Olympian gods. Asclepian healing practice was very different from that administered by his formidable father. The healing granted by Apollo, the Averter of Evil, the Purger and Purifier, was swift, coming from afar, abstract, detached, and as sudden as a lightning bolt, since he was a god of healing and a god of punishment in equal measure. Apollo healed the plagues he sent. The followers of the path of Asclepius, however, relied heavily on ritual (incubation), honored the right time and place, and always paid homage to the earth goddess.

There are at least three different versions of Asclepius’ birth. In one of them recounted by Robert Graves, it was not Apollo who snatched the baby out of the funeral pyre, but Hermes. I find this tidbit quite appealing, because Asclepios seems to be a very Hermetic figure to me. He walked the earth with a staff in his hand (known today the rod of Asclepius), devoting his time to “praxis kai logos,” i.e. “treating with hands and by speaking magic words.” To describe the process, Meier quotes from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus: “He ascends to Heaven from earth, and again descends to earth, and is endowed with the strength of the Powers above and below”. Asclepius is in fact one of the prominent characters of Corpus Hermeticum, in which he makes an appearance as a devoted follower and disciple of Hermes Trismegistus himself. Hermes admonishes Asclepius to devote himself to the world rather than escape it by saying to him in Book IX that “sense and understanding both flow together in man, as they are entwined with each other. It is neither possible to understand without sense nor to sense without understanding.” Higher understanding must be rooted in the body – this is the essence of hermeticism. Furthermore, number three seems to be of special significance to Asclepius, as it is to Hermes. There are three myths related to his birth, there are three animals sacred to him – the snake, the cock and the dog. The cock, like Hermes, connects to the inherent duality of being as an animal that, as Tick puts it, “straddles yin and yang, darkness and light, day and night. It calls us to consciousness, crying at the break of dawn to awaken us from dreams.” It heralds the sunrise, and so did Asclepius derive his divine gifts from his father, the sun god.

As a figure that united opposites – both god and human – Asclepius represents further dualities; for example, he was often portrayed both as a boy and as a mature man. He was born amidst fire and died being struck by a lightning bolt, but his life on earth revolved around sacred groves and springs, and was of a very earthy nature. After he was killed, thanks to his apotheosis he became associated with the constellation of Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer, the Snake Charmer). Furthermore, Ophiuchus was understood as “the fetus attached to the umbilicus cord”:

“Ophiuchus, from Greek Ophiukhos, literally ‘holding a serpent’, from Greek opis (or ophis), the Greek word for ‘serpent’, + Greek ekhein, ‘to hold, keep, have’. … there is a suggestion that there is a likely relationship between the Greek words ophis and *omphi-. [Omphi from the Indo-European root *nobh-. Related words ‘umbilicus’, ‘omphallus’, ‘navel’, ‘nave’, the hub of a wheel]. The constellation Ophiuchus is identified with Asclepius who was cut from his mother’s womb as a foetus. The long tube-like shape of a snake bears a resemblance to an umbilical cord. When the snake is curled up it might appear to be like the nave or hub of a wheel. [The womb is represented by Delphinus.] Ophiuchus was called Ciconia, the Stork, by the Arabian astronomers. They had depicted a stork in the place of Ophiuchus.”

Via http://www.constellationsofwords.com/Constellations/Ophiuchus.html

Asclepius entered and exited the world in an equally dramatic fashion, indicating his connection with liminal states, balancing between death and life, being exposed to the ultimate realities of existence symbolized by the divine fire.  Those who received a healing from him saw him as a kind, compassionate and gentle figure, like Chiron.  He was compared to both the sun and the moon: his wisdom was solar and paternal, his care and tenderness lunar and maternal. One of the versions of Asclepius’ origins has him as a pre-olympian primordial god of the earth, one of the “chthonioi” or spirits that lived in “the dark recesses of the earth.” As such a demon, he was not only a healer but also an oracle. The vestiges of this myth are visible in the choice of animals sacred to Asclepius: both the dog and the snake have an obvious affinity with the underworld. They are conjoined symbolically in the mythological figure of the hydra which was both the snake and the hound. A large number of underground monsters such as the Erinyes, the Gorgon or Cerberus shared the characteristics of both animals. Further, both the serpent and the dog, as guardians of inner treasure, connect to the underworld and the souls of the dead, the dog being their guide, while the snake being symbolic of death and rebirth. After Medusa was slain, her blood was divided between Athena and Asclepius. It was believed that the blood from her right vein cured, and from the left killed. Any healing work requires a careful and loving unification of opposites. Both the name Medusa and the word ‘medicine’ come from the same Greek root word med– which means ‘to devise, to use powerful means, to consider, judge, estimate and measure.’ It was Apollo who called for moderation in everything at his Delphic oracle; with excess any remedy could turn into poison.

The snake as a healing symbol has a long-standing tradition. In his essay “The Snake is Not a Symbol,” included in his book Animal Presences, James Hillman provides a summary of twelve meanings of the snake, some of which are:

1.The snake is renewal and rebirth, because it sheds its skin.

…

4. It is a feminine symbol, having a sympathetic relation with Eve and goddesses in Crete, India, Africa, and elsewhere.
5. The snake is a phallus, because it stiffens, erects its head, and ejects fluid from its tip. Besides, it penetrates crevices.

…

7. The snake is a healer; it is a medicine. …
8. It is a guardian of holy men and wise men – even the New Testament says that serpents are wise.
9. The snake brings fertility, for it is found by wells and springs and represents the cool, moist element.
10. A snake is Death, because of its poison and the instant anxiety it arouses.
11. It is the inmost truth of the body, like the sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous system of the serpent power of Kundalini yoga.
12. The snake is the symbol for the unconscious psyche – particularly the introverting libido, the inward-turning energy that goes back and down and in. Its seduction draws us into darkness and deeps. It is always a “both”: creative-destructive, male-female, poisonous-healing, dry-moist, spiritual-material …

It is worth pointing out that all chthonic gods had a strong connection to phallic energies perceived as regenerative and procreative.

How was healing effectuated in the Asclepeion, i.e. a healing temple of Asclepius? In the most famous sanctuary at Epidaurus, built in the valley below Apollo’s shrine, harmless snakes and dogs accompanied the sick throughout all healing rituals. Other outstanding features were the ubiquity of water (supposedly flowing through a sacred labyrinth) and musical performances. The central healing ritual was incubation, which can be likened to a dream questing. As Meier points out, for Greeks dreams were not figments of imagination but “something that really happened.” They were perceived as stimulating the natural “soothsaying of the psyche.” Symptoms were always viewed as external expressions of the deeper underlying reality of the psyche. In other words, the correspondence (synchronicity) between body and mind, the outer and inner world, is what constituted every symptom. While incubating, the sick person slept in the abaton, lying on a klinē, from which our modern word “clinic” is derived. The abaton or adyton was, as Meier describes, a “place not to be entered unbidden.” It was the holiest part of the temple. Scholars conjecture that it was supposed to be entered only by those who were invited or called to do so. The ritual of incubation was very much an initiation into a mystery, a crossing over to the higher dimension of being. In a similar fashion, the healing sanctuary of Isis in Tithorea, Greece, could not have been entered by those not invited by the goddess in a dream. Coming uninvited incurred a harsh punishment. The rite of incubation brought about healing on many levels. The participants were encouraged to wear white garments that symbolized purity and receptivity of the soul, its return to the original innocence. Before approaching such sacred powers, the daily mind had to be silenced, the body cleansed, senses purified. Meier adds that the rite also “healed people of bad fate or destiny.” Asclepius himself appeared in a dream or a vision, touched the sick organ, thus healing it.

The Orphic hymn to Asclepius calls him mighty and soothing, one that “charms away the pain.” He, like the earth goddess Demeter, was invoked as “a blessed spirit of joyful growth.” Interestingly, Demeter was also regarded as a healing goddess that was accompanied by serpents. Meier says that the Demeter-Persephone mysteries of Eleusis featured Asclepius as its prominent deity ever since he himself was initiated into the Mysteries. Like most secrets of Eleusinian mysteries, the intricacies of the healing that occurred under the cover of the night at an Asclepian sanctuary will forever remain veiled to our daytime understanding. The work of healing incubation was highly individualized and case sensitive. Each case was treated as different and unique, because “the waking have one world and a common one, but when asleep everyone turns away from it into their own world,” as Heraclitus wrote in the famous fragment 89.

Sources:

Fritz Graf, Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World), Kindle edition

James Hillman, Animal Presences, Kindle edition

C.A. Meier, Healing Dream and Ritual: Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy, Kindle edition

The Orphic Hymns, translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow

Edward Tick, The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine, Quest Books 2001

She is splendid, imposing, imperial. 9 metres high, she slowly revolves round her axis, revealing all the facets of her provocative ensemble. In her left palm sits a naked minuscule pope, in her right – a minuscule naked emperor; both look ludicrous in their Hats of Power. This landmark statue, towering magnificently over the harbor of the German city of Constance, was installed clandestinely at night in 1993. Its controversy did not sit well with the city council, who, however, had no jurisdiction over the harbor, controlled by the German Railways, who welcomed the statue of Imperia with open hands. The woman portrayed by the statue is called Imperia. She is the work of Peter Lenk Bildhauer, who, inspired by a short story by Balzac, wanted to commemorate the notorious Council of Constance (1414-1418).

Jan Hus

Before the Council was convoked, as many as three popes had been claiming the right to the papal throne. The church was corrupt and in disarray. The general public was kept in the dark about it. “Sancta Simplicitas” (Oh, Holy Naiveté), Jan Hus was supposed to have exclaimed when he saw an elderly pious woman eagerly adding brushwood to his burning stake. This enlightened church reformer, an intellectual, a Czech precursor of Protestantism, who made a grave mistake of condemning the dubious moral conduct of the clergy, was sentenced to death by the Council of Constance. The integrity of the Council was questionable for yet another reason: with the arrival of holier-than-thou men of the cloth, the city of Constance observed a steep rise in prostitution (1500 prostitutes alone arrived as permanent members of churchmen’s retinues). In Balzac’s story, which inspired the German sculptor, the magnificent courtesan Imperia holds sway over numerous pious members of the council. They are not able to withstand her seductiveness and one by one let themselves get swept off their feet.

The name of the city – Constance – seems to point to what is truly constant, unchanging: the eternal power of the feminine. To me, by her gesture, Imperia evokes the Minoan Snake Goddess (ca 1600 BC). Her snake invested power is immortal, and she has the magnificence of Lilith in her stature.

Giorgio de Chirico, “The Awakening of Ariadne”

“Enter the turret of your love, and lie
close in the arms of the sea; let in new suns
that beat and echo in the mind like sounds
risen from sunken cities lost to fear;
let in the light that answers your desire
awakening at midnight with the fire,
until its magic burns the wavering sea
and flames caress the windows of your tower.”

Denise Levertov, “The Sea’s Wash in the Hollow of the Heart…”

The threads of Ariadne’s mythical story are manifold and contradictory. Her name, according to Graves, meant “most pure” and “high fruitful mother of the barley.” According to this scholar, she was the Cretan snake goddess, and the Mistress of the Labyrinth, where she led other maidens in a sensuous winding dance. In a popular myth, she helps Theseus catch the Minotaur by offering him a ball of thread to navigate his way through the Labyrinth, where the monstrous half man, half bull lived, and feasted regularly on human flesh. The Minotaur was a dark and beastly shadow figure, contradictory to Ariadne’s purity.  He was the offspring of Pasiphaë and a beautiful white bull, which Minos – Pasiphaë’s husband and Ariadne’s father – refused to sacrifice to Poseidon due to greed. Poseidon made Pasiphaë fall in love with the bull as an act of revenge on Minos.

Picasso, “Minotaur kneeling over sleeping girl”

Because she had fallen in love with Theseus, she renounced her family and her native land to follow him to Athens. But Theseus abandoned her on the desolate island of Naxos:

Evelyn de Morgan, “Ariadne on Naxos”

“Not the home where she was born, and certainly not the home she hoped to be welcomed in, nor even some country in between. Just a beach lashed by thundering waves, an abstract place where only the seaweed moves. It is the island where no one lives, the place where obsession turns round and round on itself, with no way out. A constant flaunting of death. This is a place of the soul.

Ariadne has been left behind. The clothes fall from her body one by one. It is a scene of mourning. Awake now, but still as the statue of a Bacchant, Minos’s daughter gazes into the distance toward the eternal absentee, for Theseus’s swift ship has already disappeared over the horizon, and her mind rises and falls with the waves. The thin ribbon that held her blond hair slips off, her cloak falls away leaving her chest bare, her breasts are no longer supported by their sash. One after another, the clothes in which she left Crete forever fall and scatter at her feet. The waves toy with them in the sand and seaweed.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

The possible continuations of the story were many, as Calasso continues:

“Abandoned in Naxos, Ariadne was shot dead by Artemis’s arrow; Dionysus ordered the killing and stood watching, motionless. Or: Ariadne hung herself in Naxos, after being left by Theseus. Or: pregnant by Theseus and shipwrecked in Cyprus, she died there in childbirth. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, together with his band of followers; they celebrated a divine marriage, after which she rose into the sky, where we still see her today amid the northern constellations. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, after which she followed him around on his adventures, sharing his bed and fighting with his soldiers; when Dionysus attacked Perseus in the country near Argos, Ariadne went with him, armed to fight amid the ranks of the crazed Bacchants, until Perseus shook the deadly face of Medusa in front of her and Ariadne was turned to stone. And there she stayed, a stone in a field.

No other woman, or goddess, had so many deaths as Ariadne. That stone in Argos, that constellation in the sky, that hanging corpse, that death by childbirth, that girl with an arrow through her breast: Ariadne was all of this.”

Dionysos surprising the sleeping Ariadne; Pompeian wall painting (House of the Vetti)

In his Seven Sermons to the Dead, C.G. Jung wrote: “The sexuality of man is more earthly, while the sexuality of woman is more heavenly. The spirituality of man is more heavenly, for it moves in the direction of the greater. On the other hand, the spirituality of woman is more earthly, for it moves in the direction of the smaller.” The heavenly luminous and pure feminine essence shudders at the encounter with the lustful Minotaur, which symbolizes the dark, maze-like entrapment of the senses and desires. But liberation can only happen by entering the Labyrinth. The movement of the spiritual towards the earthly inevitably entails suffering through multiple symbolic deaths, as was the case with Ariadne. The Worthy Bull was one of the epithets of Dionysus, whom Ariadne married and for whom she bore many notable children. In some versions of the myth, after marrying Dionysus Ariadne received a new name – Libera (Liberty). Her wedding gift from the god was a crown, made by Hephaestus of “fiery gold and Indian gems, set in the shape of roses.” (Graves). It was set among the stars as the constellation of the Corona Borealis.

Corona Borealis

On the website The Constellation of Words, the author discusses the manifold symbolism of the crown, going as far as linking it to the Statue of Liberty. The crown encompasses a rich symbolism of being bounded by fate, being bound like slaves, but also being bound by an auspicious and fruitful (marital) union:

“The Statue of Liberty symbolically represents Libertas (liberty), Ancient Rome’s goddess of freedom from slavery, oppression and tyranny. Ariadne was marooned on an island. To be marooned is to be put ashore on a deserted island or coast and intentionally abandoned. A Maroon was the word for a fugitive slave in the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liberia, a country in West Africa, was founded and settled mainly by freed slaves. …The crown has associations with both liberty and also slavery ‘in ancient times slaves taken by right of conquest were sold wearing garlands, and hence were said to be sold ‘under a crown.’ …the crown was a sign that those who were being sold were captives.’”

Retrieved from http://www.constellationsofwords.com/Constellations/CoronaBorealis.html

Ariadne – both a mortal woman and a goddess, abandoned and rescued, bounded and liberated, a Labyrinth guide who became lost and marooned on a desert island, is one of the most fascinating faces of the eternal feminine. Her gentleness and purity is palpable in Picasso’s painting showing a blind Minotaur being led by a girl with a white dove.

Pablo Picasso, “Blind Minotaur Led by a Girl in the Night”

After the beast was slayed, she told Theseus to sacrifice the Minotaur to Poseidon – the god of the sea. It is in the sea where all the opposing forces dissolve: power and tenderness, lust and love, slavery and liberty, become One again. However, in the earthly world of the senses, Ariadne had to experience the awakening to the world of piercing, conflicting desires and emotions.

“From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one airy hill.
The sun and moon shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting
Hand, the breaking of the hair,
From the first scent of the heart, the warning ghost,
And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,
The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,
The growing bones, the rumour of the manseed
Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,
And the four winds, that had long blown as one,
Shone in my ears the light of sound,
Called in my eyes the sound of light.
And yellow was the multiplying sand,
Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,
The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,
And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
To shade and knit anew the patch of words
Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
Need no word’s warmth.
The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,
That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.

One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,
One breast gave suck the fever’s issue;
From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,
The two-framed globe that spun into a score;
A million minds gave suck to such a bud
As forks my eye;
Youth did condense; the tears of spring
Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;
One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.”

I find this poem strikingly beautiful. It has been viewed as rendering the evolution of a poet from the simplicity of childhood through the complexity of confusing adolescence back to the simplicity of conscious maturity. The first stanzas, which describe the budding consciousness of a child, are smoother and lighter, in comparison to the closing lines, which are slower and heavier, as if loaded with complex and manifold life experience. Reaching maturity means returning to oneness that characterized childhood, yet it is now of a deeper and more substantial quality. The poem seems to point out that mature consciousness is both simple and complex, simultaneously turning inwards and outwards. In childhood it is undifferentiated, then it differentiates and polarizes (especially by means of language and thinking) amidst the turmoils of adolescence, only to subsequently reach a synthesis, but now from a richer perspective. Manna – the nourishment sent by God to the Israelis wondering through the desert – has a deeply human and maternal connotation, and yet it is warmed by the rays of the Sun, which is the most universal symbol of distant divine consciousness. On account of its tremendous maturity, it is extraordinary that Dylan Thomas was only eighteen when he wrote the poem. I cannot think of a better expression of growing into consciousness than this.

Alex Grey, “Promise” via http://alexgrey.com/art/paintings/soul/promise/

Source of inspiration for interpreting the poem:

Helma Louise Baughan Murdy, “Sound and Meaning in Dylan Thomas’s Poetry” Via https://archive.org/stream/soundmeaningindy00murd/soundmeaningindy00murd_djvu.txt

The lion mosaic in residential unit 3 in terrace house 2, Ephesus

“But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”

“…when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.”

Rudhyard Kipling, “The Cat that Walked by Himself”

Ephesus, located in present day Turkey, was an ancient Greek city famous for the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, as well as the birthplace of the philosopher Heraclitus. In Roman times it was the capital of Asia, the richest province of the Roman Empire. I was inspired to expand my knowledge on that ancient city after being gifted a beautiful and unique book that explores the ruins of the city from a very special perspective. It was written by an Austrian scientist and leader of the archaeological excavations, Sabine Ladstätter, who teamed up with an excellent photographer Lois Lammerhuber to capture the life of cats roaming the ancient ruins in large numbers. She wrote:

“They seem to be the last worshippers of the goddess. They draw themselves up to full height, paws raised towards heaven, their eyes set on something not immediately recognizable to the human observer. The cats of Ephesus love hunting bees. Their poses are adopted while they hunt for the insect once regarded as a symbol of the Artemis of Ephesus in antiquity.”

The Greeks believed that the goddess Artemis sometimes appeared in cat form herself. This is why she was identified with the Egyptian Bastet, the cat goddess who ruled pleasure, eroticism and joy, and who was seen as mild and benevolent on the one hand, but ferocious and vengeful on the other. Like Artemis, she was believed to protect women during pregnancy. She was viewed as a protective deity able to counter the dark forces, which, according to ancient Egyptian beliefs, were especially active at the end of the year. For that reason cat amulets were popular New Year gifts in ancient Egypt.

Bastet

The ambivalence of cat symbolism carried on into later times, especially into the Middle Ages and the times of witch hunts, as Biedermann, who associates the negative valuation of the cat with “an aggressive attitude to that which is female,” observes:

“The eye of the cat, which appears to change as the light strikes it from different angles, was considered deceptive, and the animal’s ability to hunt even in virtual darkness led to the belief that it was in league with the forces of darkness. … The cat is tireless and cunning when going after its prey – the virtues of a good soldier. This is why the Swabians, Swiss, and Burgundians of old had cats in their coats of arms, standing for liberty.”

Hans Biedermann, “Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them”

via commons.wikimedia.org

Interestingly, according to some ancient legends, Ephesus was first settled around 6000 BC by the Amazons, the mythical tribe of female warriors. They may have built a shrine to Cybele millennia before the site became the centre of the cult of Artemis. One thing very obviously always remained unchanged, though, namely the association of Ephesus with the goddess. Even early Christians appropriated the place as the site of the cult of Mary.  According to a legend, Mother of Jesus may have spent her last years in Ephesus. To this day The House of the Virgin Mary, believed by some to be her last home built by Apostle John, is a popular place of pilgrimage.

Susan Seddon Boulet, “Bast”

Cats are undoubtedly creatures of the goddess. Like Artemis and earlier the Amazons, they are wild, free and virtually untamed. Excellent hunters (much more skillful and effective than dogs), cats are believed to be only semi-domesticated by modern science. They love to roam the ruins of Ephesus, as these appear to be such a perfect interface between nature and culture. What archeologists expose, nature reclaims quickly. Thick vegetation covers the ancient walls unless painstaking maintenance effort is made continuously. Unfortunately, virtually nothing is left of the legendary temple of Artemis, with its countless marble columns, the cedar ceiling, cypress doors and the magnificent statue of the goddess with many breasts, eggs or bull testicles, depending on the source.

Artemis of Ephesus

The temple was burnt by a mad man seeking fame. In a fascinating turn of event, this calamity coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great:

“…Philip II, who had just been released from captivity in Thebes, was appointed regent of Macedonia. Three years later, his wife, Olympias, gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named Alexander, and on the very same day, a man named Herostratus intentionally burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. According to Plutarch, ‘All the Magi, who were then at Ephesus, looked upon the fire as a sign which betokened a much greater misfortune: they ran about the town, beating their faces and crying ‘that they day had brought forth the great scourge and destroyer of Asia.’”

“Ancient Ephesus: The History and Legacy of One’s of Antiquity’s Greatest Cities” by Charles River Editors

After conquering Ephesus, however, Alexander the Great treated its citizens with reverence and respect. Perhaps he was aware that even without the temple, the spirit of Ephesus could not be vanquished. The city flourished under ancient Romans and was very significant during the subsequent Byzantine Empire as well. Today, cats symbolically reclaim the city for the goddess.

Late antique inscription base, with the facade of the Library of Celsus in the background

I.“Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.”

“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you.”

“Love is the veil between lover and lover.”

Khalil Gibran, “Sand and Foam”

II.“And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.”

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

Khalil Gibran, “The Prophet”

On 6 January, birth day of Khalil Gibran, The New Yorker shared an article “Prophet Motive,” which was originally published in 2008. To speak of Khalil Gibran without any kind of spiritual sensitivity is a travesty, and this is precisely what I thought of the article. The author gleefully expresses her contempt that The Prophet, though largely shunned by literary critics, is the third best selling book of all time, giving way only to Shakespeare and Lao-Tsy. The article contains a lot of unfounded conjectures concerning Gibran’s private life (also his inner life) and relationships, while simultaneously dismissing his writing in passages such as this, devoted to The Prophet:

“Almustafa’s advice is not bad: love involves suffering; children should be given their independence. Who, these days, would say otherwise? More than the soundness of its advice, however, the mere fact that “The Prophet” was an advice book—or, more precisely, “inspirational literature”—probably insured a substantial readership at the start. Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies.

Then, there is the pleasing ambiguity of Almustafa’s counsels. In the manner of horoscopes, the statements are so widely applicable (“your creativity,” “your family problems”) that almost anyone could think that they were addressed to him. At times, Almustafa’s vagueness is such that you can’t figure out what he means. If you look closely, though, you will see that much of the time he is saying something specific; namely, that everything is everything else. Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. So, whatever you’re doing, you needn’t worry, because you’re also doing the opposite.”

The profound mystical truth of the unity of opposites was first put forward by Heraclitus. It reverberated in the work of the greatest mystics of centuries to come: Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Paracelsus, Carl Jung, Gershom Scholem, William Blake, to name just a few; as well as in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Sufism. Coincidentia oppositorum was the aim of the alchemical opus. Thus, the secret of Gibran’s appeal is not his simplicity but its quality of uniting and transcending all creeds, religions and dogmas, finding their shared spiritual and mystical core. Comparing Gibran to Paulo Coelho is both sad and hilarious, if I may add another paradox to the writer’s list. But calling The Prophet an advice book captures rather ingeniously everything that is wrong with the arid shallowness and soullessness of Western intellectualism.

Khalil Gibran, “Divine World”

The Prophet is, to me, one of the most profound works ever created. Surely, from purely literary perspective it may be lacking (English was not Gibran’s first language – he came to America not speaking it at all), but its spiritual impact, its wisdom and the way it stirs the heart, more than compensates for all its alleged shortcomings. Also, some turns of phrase are sheer beauty. And perhaps most importantly, i strongly believe that the words of Khalil Gibran possess a healing quality, though I cannot prove it. It is an extraordinary legacy to the strength of his spirit how he, a child of poor parents from Lebanon, whose mother was forced to leave her native country, with the help of rich patrons and his own strength of character managed to overcome his initial cultural and linguistic handicap. Not completely, though, because as an Arab immigrant he was never able to quite shed the stigma. He remained a second-class citizen, which might have driven him into alcoholism and depression, though this is sheer speculation. In a BBC documentary much more sympathizing with Gibran than the New Yorker article, it is suggested that being an immigrant he was not able to marry his lifelong patroness Mary Haskell because she would have lost her job and her family if that had happened.

Mary Haskell

However, the New Yorker article claims that he never intended to marry her and simply took financial advantage of her weakness towards him. How does gold digging fit, though, when even if he was making a fortune on his royalties (which came much later in his life) he never left his New York studio apartment, which he lit with candles and called his hermitage? The same article deals quite offensively with the year 1902, when Gibran’s mother, brother and sister all died, suddenly leaving him alone in the world. The following quote from the article is simply stunning in its arbitrariness: “…there is no evidence that Gibran mourned any of them for long. It is hard to escape the thought that this ambitious young man was not inconvenienced by the loss of his slum-dwelling family.” The BBC documentary, on the other hand, paints a picture of a young man deeply struck by tragedy. It was this painful experience that made the lines in The Prophet devoted to pain and suffering so deeply moving: “It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.”

Kahlil Gibran, “Towards the Infinite (Kamila Gibran, mother of the artist), 1916, via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/487710

What The Prophet imparts is not simplistic or fluffy or “new-agey.”  My personal favourite passages are concerned with the role and nature of evil in the world. Consider this excerpt and its implications:

“And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.

The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,

And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for the guiltless and unblamed.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

…

And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the axe unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;

And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.”

Khalil Gibran, Sketch for “Jesus the Son of Man,” via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/487711

In Gibran’s lesser known, but excellent work called Jesus, the Son of Men, those who knew Jesus are given voice to speak about him. For example, John, his beloved disciple, says of Jesus: “I loved Him because He quickened my spirit to heights beyond my stature, and to depths beyond my sounding.” Gibran is said to have had a lifelong fascination with Jesus, and the above quote is also true of his impact on many souls of his contemporaries and of those who still continue to discover the book today. By Muslims he is predominantly viewed as a rebel. He advocated the rights of women and called for reforming Islam. Yet, he is the most overpowering when speaking of universal and eternal themes that do not touch religion or politics but express the profoundest depths of the human soul, like this famous passage on love from The Prophet:

Drawing by Gibran

“When love beckons to you, follow him,

Though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.

Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.

He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire

that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.”

Source of quotes:

Kahlil Gibran, Collected Works, Edited by Dr Chandrad Prasad, Kindle edition

The video to David Bowie’s “Blackstar” overpowered me immediately when it was released on 19 November last year. It is a visual poem and a symbolic feast. Despite the iconic yellow smiley face flashed at the viewer at the very beginning of it, it penetrates deep. The solar eclipse from the opening scene brought to mind the alchemical Black Sun, associated with death and putrefaction. The nigredo or the black stage in alchemy is the chaotic state in which all elements are separated and swirling around in a dance of creation and destruction. During the solar eclipse, when our star turns black, the ego becomes overshadowed and must yield its power to the serpentine forces of chaos and death. In the opening scenes, we see the “Starman” who has left his mortal coil; yet later we find out that his skull is encrusted with jewels. A beautiful woman, majestically swinging a tail like an Egyptian goddess, opens the Starman’s helmet, unveiling his glittering and indestructible hidden essence. She proceeds to carry the skull like a relic though a dreamy scenery of an oriental looking city. The first stanzas say:

In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen
Stands a solitary candle, ah-ah, ah-ah
In the centre of it all, in the centre of it all
Your eyes
​
On the day of execution, on the day of execution
Only women kneel and smile, ah-ah, ah-ah
At the centre of it all, at the centre of it all
Your eyes, your eyes
​

Ormen is a mysterious reference; most interpreters seem to go with the idea that it relates to a Norwegian word for snakes. It does seem to be a profound homage to women’s power as the guardians of the mystery of life and death, the magnificently swinging tail signaling a connection with the root chakra, the earth and the rising of the kundalini energy. The blindfold suggests the awakening of inner vision of the centre, symbolized by the solitary candle. The forces of chaos are further suggested by the peculiar shaky dance movements of the three figures while the circle of women moving in trance brings to mind shamanism and ecstatic wisdom achieved at the moment of dissolution of boundaries.

What follows is a moment of self-irony with Bowie holding a book like a communist leader speaking to a crowd. I absolutely love the following stanza:

I can’t answer why (I’m a blackstar)
Just go with me (I’m not a filmstar)
I’m-a take you home (I’m a blackstar)
Take your passport and shoes (I’m not a popstar)
And your sedatives, boo (I’m a blackstar)
You’re a flash in the pan (I’m not a marvel star)
I’m the great I am (I’m a blackstar)

I love the jester tone of self-mockery accompanying this dialogue with Death/God/Higher Power. Do not make me into a prophet, he seems to be saying. Someone else will replace me as an idol soon enough:

Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a star star, I’m a blackstar)

The song oscillates between high and low tones of the sacred and the profane. When he reaches the mystical heights, the music sounds almost almost like a Gregorian chant, in other parts the trademark Bowie trickster rock is palpable. I love the three scarecrows in the field, echoing Jesus hanging on the cross with the two thieves on his sides. Their pelvises move rhythmically. It is hard to decide if the dance is that of ecstasy or are these bodies writhing in excruciating pain? But do we need to decide? Pain and ecstasy, death and creation are morphing into each other in the sky where the Black Star shines. The last minute of the video conveys a feeling of the dread of dying. How did a dying hand manage to scribble such an eloquent testimony of the most final of all experiences?

Rings of X-ray light centered on V404 Cygni, a binary system containing an erupting black hole (dot at center), via https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-s-hubble-finds-evidence-of-galaxy-star-birth-regulated-by-black-hole-fountain

I.“He had begun by speaking of mines and metals, of gold and diamonds and all precious elements buried deep in the earth, but now, without my knowing how, he had ranged out into the depths of space, and was telling me of quasars and pulsars, of red giants and brown dwarfs and black holes, of heat death and the Hubble constant, of quarks and quirks and multiple infinities. And of dark matter. The universe, according to him, contains a missing mass we cannot see or feel or measure. There is much, much more of it than there is of anything else, and the visible universe, the one that we know, is sparse and puny in comparison. I thought of it, this vast invisible sea of weightless and transparent stuff, present everywhere, undetected, through which we move, unsuspecting swimmers, and which moves through us, a silent, secret essence.”

John Banville, “Ancient Light”

II.“Ever incomplete, terrestrial, and then again celestial,

you circle around in pursuit of sprightly phantoms,

you force light into the nether world…”

Orphic Hymn to Night

III. “You have no form, even though with the help of Maya, you take on myriads of forms. You have no beginning, though you are the beginning of all. It is you who creates, upholds and dissolves the worlds.”

Mahanirvana Tantra (quoted from “Shiva: The Wild God of Power and Ecstasy” by Wolf-Dieter, Ph.D. Storl)

Having listened to a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time dedicated to black holes, I was particularly struck by one observation made during the show. The remark was a definition of singularity, which lies at the centre of a black hole – “a place where gravity becomes infinite and where physics transcends what we now understand.” Anything that enters a black hole, having crossed the so-called event horizon, enters the sphere of mystery: it is no longer observable, while all communication with it is lost. A hypothetical body sucked into the black hole by way of its irresistible gravitational pull would be cruelly ripped apart.  It is dense mass and gravity that overwhelms all other forces, including light, and also obliterating the power of time. Anything that falls into the black hole will release infinite amount of energy, emitting blinding brightness of quasars or exploding stars. Although no energy comes from the black hole itself, objects interacting with it are energized to a tremendous extent.

A fascinating issue divides physicists: what happens with the information that gets sucked into a black hole? Some believe it is just lost, though this goes against the scientific axiom of quantum mechanics that it should be conserved. Stephen Hawking upholds that the information must survive:

“’I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,’ Hawking said at a conference back in August 2015. ‘The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.’

The idea is that when charged particles get sucked into a black hole, their information leaves behind a kind of two-dimensional holographic imprint on the event horizon. This means that while all the physical components of an object would be so totally obliterated by a black hole encounter, its blueprint lives on.”

Via http://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-just-published-new-solution-to-the-black-hole-information-paradox

Robert Fludd, “Utriusque Cosmi”

Leaving an exciting possibility of black holes being portals to other universes aside, another question seems even more pressing: Was the Big Bang and the creation of the universe a result of a black hole seeding the manifest reality? This has been strongly suggested by Stephen Hawking. However, nothing is certain or proven as of yet:

“It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions. The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

‘For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,’ says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.”

via http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743

Black holes are said to be extremely efficient in converting matter into energy through the process of accretion. The spinning matter forms a brightly shining belt around the event horizon of the black hole. This luminous halo is called a quasar. It is postulated that a supermassive black hole lies at the very centre of our galaxy. Before the twentieth century and the theory of relativity, such an idea was inconceivable. The concept of the existence of black holes has been proven beyond doubt now, but when the idea was first postulated by John Mitchell as early as in 1783, nobody was mentally equipped to grasp it. The long-forgotten concept had to be rediscovered in the last century.

Robert Fludd, “Utriusque Cosmi”

In 1848, Edgar Allan Poe published a non-fiction work called Eureka: A Prose Poem. Some of its part were subsequently interpreted as postulating the existence of black holes, albeit in a purely intuitive, non-scientific fashion. In an essay dedicated to Eureka, David Grantz wrote:

“Poe states that God created matter from His spirit. The matter originally assumed its simplest form, without distinct kind, character, nature, size, or form. This primary particle comprised Oneness, which Poe believed to be the ‘natural’ condition of the universe. … However, for reasons unknown, the primary particle was willed by God into the ‘abnormal condition of Many.’ Because of gravity and according to their proximity, the irradiated atoms coalesced, later becoming suns, galaxies, planets, moons, and other cosmic debris. Finally, differentiation of particles by size, kind, form, character, and nature became possible, awaiting only the dualistic mind required to perceive the differentiations. Today’s astro-physicists speak more specifically in their discussion of particles than did Poe, who merely speaks of atoms; but the process of the irradiating universe is the same.

Very important is Poe’s idea that the normal condition of the universe can be achieved only in the unity of the primary particle. As a result, all matter longs to return to that which gave it birth. The force which compels all matter to return to simpler forms is gravity. Because of gravity, all atoms lump together in the most comfortable posture possible until the particle proper is completely reassembled.

…

Even before the primary particle becomes completely reassembled, aggregations of ‘various unique masses’ (Harrison 210) are possible, each mass assuming the characteristics of the original One. Today scientists call these particles black holes. They constitute energy and matter in their undifferentiated form, possessing gravity so great that not even light can escape from them.

…

Poe believed that the multitude of stars, having spiraled from their source, were bound to return to the Unity from which they were spun.”

Via http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/eureka/

I read on black holes with fascination, and if you are anything like me, you will agree that they are incredibly poetic. Echoing the Heart Sutra, to understand black holes is to understand that “emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form” (translated by E. Conze). I can imagine the mysterious singularity, simultaneously acting and non-acting, as the Heart of Perfect Wisdom. The sphinxlike qualities of black holes fascinate and elude full understanding. They seem to be associated with stillness, yet the objects pulled by them are locked in an ecstatic dance, swirling around the invisible dark centre.

Gustave Dore, “Heavenly Host,” Dante’s “Divine Comedy” – Paradise

Werther and Lotte

“She had a wildness in her eyes and into it I plunged.”

Goethe, “Sorrows of Young Werther”

In January 1778 Christel von Lassberg drowned herself in the river Ilm, the reason most probably being unrequited love. A copy of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther was found in her pocket. Goethe was distraught. He had written the book to purge himself of a period of suffering that a failed romance had cost him. He did achieve his catharsis but a lot of his reading public went “Werther-mad” after the book was published:

“In scores of literary, plastic, and musical forms Werther’s life was extended in Europe and America and even into China (where a porcelain factory reproduced him on tea-sets for the European market). Men dressed like him, in blue coat, buff-yellow waistcoat and knee-breeches, women wore a perfume called ‘Eau de Werther’.”

(from the Introduction by David Constantine, Oxford World’s Classics, Kindle edition)

The beautiful poem “To the Moon” that Goethe wrote shortly after Christel’s demise and possibly to commemorate her, seems to capture one of the main paradoxes of love, which was so eloquently expressed by Werther in one of his letters: “Does it have to be the case that what made a person’s felicity will become the source of his wretchedness?” In the poem Goethe receives solace and a promise of spring rebirth from the river:

River, flow the vale along,
Without rest or ease,
Murmur, whisper to my song
Gentle melodies!

Swelling in the winter night
With thy roaring flood,
Bubbling in the spring’s delight,
Over leaf and bud!

I have recently reread The Sorrows of Young Werther to find that it has not aged; quite the contrary, it is every inch as compelling as it was when I first read it. In the Introduction to the Oxford World Classic’s edition that I read, David Constantine points out an interesting tidbit: the book was written two years before The Declaration of Independence famously proclaimed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Werther’s plight stemmed from, among other things, the social mores of the times. Lotte was out of bounds for him. Nowadays, we hold a belief that there should be no barriers to love, and certainly not those erected by social strata; that who and how we love should remain at our own discretion. But the torment in our souls caused by love is just as tumultuous as it was for Werther.

Goethe’s novel abounds in beautiful passages. In a manner of true Romantics, nature plays a pertinent part in Werther’s expressions of his undying love. I particularly enjoyed the letter in which he delineates how from a state of powerful tranquility, serene contemplation and self-contentment (all that prior to meeting Lotte), his psyche was catapulted into torment and despair:

“The full and warm feeling of my heart for living Nature, my wellspring of abundant joy that turned the world to paradise on every side, has now become my unbearable tormentor, a spirit of torture pursuing me wherever I go.”

Caspar David Friedrich, “The Tree of Crows”

Vincent van Gogh, “Wheatfield of Crows”

“And so I reel in fear, the energies of heaven and earth weaving around me. And all I see is an eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster,” he concludes. The entire book is so delightfully quotable it is hard to resist one more piece: “I wander the moors in the howling of the storm-wind that marshals ancestral ghosts in a wreathing mist in the unsteady light of the moon.” This tunnel vision drives him to self-destruction; suicide is a natural consequence, a tragic yet logical conclusion.

Lotte, who was married to a stable and predictable Albert, at one point asked Werther whether it was the impossibility of possessing her that made his desire so exciting. A portend question. The Sorrows are written in the form of letters to a friend, whose replies we can never read. This artistic decision of Goethe was acknowledged as masterstroke by the critics, for it highlights Werther’s self-absorption and his self-serving alienation. Is Lotte a woman of flesh and blood or, as Jungians would call it, a rampant anima complex possessing the hero’s psyche? Did he fall in love with a shadow that he mistook for substance, to paraphrase Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

This brings me to Shakespeare and a much more comforting masterpiece of his, namely The Winter’s Tale. This may not be his most famous play, nevertheless it is truly delightful. Neither a tragedy nor a comedy, though it ends happily, it was dubbed “a problem play.”  Yes, the consequences of love can be catastrophic, Shakespeare seems to be saying, but there is a great potential for healing in love; also, from great passion arises great art. In the story, king Leontes becomes irrationally jealous (is jealousy ever rational?) of his pregnant wife Hermione and imprisons her in a tower. Even though the Oracle of Delphi pronounces her innocent, he stubbornly persists in his paranoia. The key words of the play are uttered by Leontes to his wife: “Your actions are my dreams,” and “Affection! Thy intention stabs the centre.” In a moment of self-reflection, he laments “the infection” of his brain. He had dreamt the whole situation. But it is too late. The queen dies, while the infant daughter is abandoned in a wasteland of a foreign land of Bohemia by the king’s servant. Leontes mourns her for years.

Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys, “Perdita”

His lost daughter is raised by a pair of shepherds who name her Perdita (the lost one). Shakespeare lovingly portrays her as a delight of spring that brings and end to the woes of winter’s tale. The servant who abandoned her to die himself dies devoured by a bear. Much can be said about the symbolism of that scene. Bear, being connected with Artemis, goddess of childbirth, exacts revenge in the name of Nature. In addition, the bear’s winter hibernation alludes to the hope of spring and rebirth. But bears also stand for senseless cruelty as epitomized by the tyrant Leontes, who wielded his power in the very wrong cause.

In a very moving ending of the play, the queen Hermione is brought back as a lifelike statue that had stood motionless for years. She is revived in a wonderful spectacle and reunited with her happy and repentant husband. On the one hand, the beautiful statue may well be a symbol artistic expression born out of torment and suffering. On the other, it is an image of frozen emotions, a typical reaction in a face of a major trauma. This passive, frozen immobility, arrested movement, is transformed into a wave of love that washes over the audience watching the final scene of Winter’s Tale. Maybe this is not really Hermione, but only an image revived by Leontes in his imagination. Nevertheless, healing is achieved, and that is all that matters.

The place closest to my heart in the whole of Switzerland is the Monastery of Einsiedeln. “Einsiedeln” is a German word for “hermitage.” Surrounded by a dark, mysterious forest, situated near a scenic lake, adjacent to glorious mountain peaks, the place is second to none of the famous holy sites of the world in its beauty. It is in this area that Paracelsus was born, and perhaps more importantly – it is a place of worship of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, a delicate statue carved lovingly in lindenwood in the first centuries AD. She was a gift from Abbess Hildegarde of Zurich to Saint Meinrad, a monk who established the hermitage of Einsiedeln.

Meinrad was born into a privileged family but he felt he needed to walk his own path instead of rising in the ranks in an established monastery of Reichenau. He wanted to leave the familiar and the predictable behind, because above all he craved a life of solitude and contemplation. He chose the life of an eremite at Etzel, a mountain pass close to Einsiedeln. However, because his wisdom was widely known, he was visited by countless pilgrims, which disturbed his inner peace. Like Dante in Divine Comedy, he felt the pull of the Dark Forest, which seemed to hold a promise of the long awaited silence, solitude, contemplation and the intensity of deep inner work. He moved into the Finsterwald (Dark Forest), taking the Black Madonna statue with him and making Her the centre of his hermitage. “Finster” is a curious and mysterious adjective in German; it means darker than dark, pitch black, impenetrable, but at the same time it does not carry any sinister connotations. It just denotes a complete lack of light, similarly to the word “Sonnenfinsternis,” that is the solar eclipse.

Meinrad died the death of a martyr at the hands of two robbers, who clubbed him to death. According to the legend, the robbers were punished thanks to two ravens, who alarmed the locals about what had occurred. The legend of the two ravens is very compelling and symbolic of Meinrad’s individuation path. In his book on the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, Fred Gustafson wrote this of the ravens, who symbolized the nigredo in alchemy – the first stage of the alchemical work:

“… as Meinrad made his way into the Finsterwald he noticed a nest in a fir tree, above which two hawks were hovering threateningly. The hermit chased the hawks away, climbed the tree, saved two ravens, and fed and cared for them. Finding a suitable clearing, he built a cell and a little chapel beside it. Meinrad dedicated the chapel to the Mother of God; today this is the site of the Monastery of Einsiedeln. The ravens stayed with him at his new hermitage.

…

In the Egyptian myth of Horus’ sparrow-hawk, as well as in the myths and symbolism of the Graeco-Roman age, the hawk is very definitely associated with the sun, that is, with the patriarchal values of logic and linear thinking. The raven, on the other hand, traditionally represents only the darker aspects, the shadow of consciousness. That the hawk would thus descend upon the young ravens symbolically represents the hostility of consciousness towards contents of the unconscious, especially embryonic contents – such as new awareness of attitudes or opinions – that need to be nourished and cared for. Meinrad’s rescue of the ravens is a spiritual victory for the emerging unconscious. The Finsterwald and the two ravens are closely related, one being the prima materia of the unconscious, the other, one’s personal relationship to the contents that begin to arise from it.

…

Ravens are indeed worthy and appropriate companions for St. Meinrad in that they fulfill their traditional role as messengers of gods, i.e., carriers of the vital messages of the unconscious to consciousness.”

Fred Gustafson, “The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln: An Ancient Image for Our Present Time, Kindle edition

St Meinrad’s chapel, via Wikipedia 

As in the case of the Dark Forest, also the darkness of the Madonna is not viewed as sinister or evil. Rather, it is peaceful, good, enveloping, and also creative, fecund, powerful and potent. It embodies the creative forces of the unconscious. The central part of the monastery is her chapel – octagonal, carved in black marble, lit by candles. In the centre, she resides surrounded by the blindingly golden halo of clouds and lightning. Her robes are extremely elaborate and ornate, and come in many shades and colours. Gustafson continues:

“She is elevated to a celestial-spiritual and dynamic position, the clouds emphasizing the former and the lightning the latter. Both have long figured as fertile, life-giving forces. In this respect, Augustine compared the apostles to a cloud because of the fertilizing nature of prophesies which, like clouds, come from a higher order. It is also said that lightning has an illuminating, vivifying, fertilizing, transforming, and healing function. Lightning, especially, is representative of energy and power; it symbolizes psychic energy in its most dynamic form. From another perspective, however, the gold lightning and clouds are just not a glorification of the Black Madonna; they are in fact eclipsed by her.”

The last sentence seems to say something very crucial about the Black Madonna. She is the creative force, the veiled mystery of darkness standing for the creative matrix. Her extremely potent and alluring quality, says Gustafson, “represents that side of the psyche that leads and entices an individual into life in its fullest measure.” She fascinates because she cannot be fathomed; she just suggests that what is apparent is just a thin layer covering the vast ocean of truth. She reminds us, according to the same author, that “for renewal to come in our time, it must be borne in the arms of the black, unknown maternal night of the unconscious, where humanity will once again open its psyche to that rich natural soil that is the mother of all human thought, invention, doctrinal formulation and truth.”

It is quite paradoxical that with Her mighty, formidable presence which makes one humble and full of reverence, She can simultaneously be related to in a very personal and direct way, as if She carried an individual healing message for each pilgrim’s soul. She is both of the earth (warm, accessible, maternal) and of heaven (distant, striking, regal). She is always surrounded by numerous pilgrims, both men and women. It is worth remembering that after Meinrad’s deaths Benedictine monks had full control over who had access to the Black Madonna statue and who was allowed to worship her. In that time, the so called Forest Sisters continued to live in loose communities of nuns without following any strict rules. They gathered herbs in the forest, practiced mystical arts and healed the pilgrims that flocked to Einsiedeln to visit the monastery. In the 16^th century, the Benedictine monks came to the conclusion that the free community of Forest Sisters was not to be tolerated on the land of the monastery. The women were evicted from the town and had to live according to strict Benedictine rules in the town of Au. In 1703 they lost their free status. In addition, they were ordered to wear black robes. They were also banned from visiting the monastery and the town of Einsiedeln.

It is astounding how that tyrannical decision goes against the all-encompassing, all-loving wisdom of the Black Madonna, who obliterates all barriers and accepts every soul based on its inner depth rather than any accidental social status. The exclusion of Forest Sisters from the cult of Black Madonna is also symbolic of the Catholic Church patriarchal slant. However, this bias stands in direct contradiction to the true spirit of the religion and its dark, impenetrable roots.

John William Waterhouse, “Sleep and His Half Brother Death,” painted after both younger brothers of the painter died of tuberculosis

While the fourteenth century was ravaged by the Black Death, the nineteenth century belonged to tuberculosis, or the White Death, a disease much more insidious and widespread. John Keats died of it at the age of twenty-six, and so did many creative geniuses of the time, such as Friedrich Schiller, Novalis, Emily Brontë, Juliusz Slowacki (a Polish Romantic poet), Frederic Chopin, and countless others. Would Romanticism ever have happened with its eruption of creative spirit, had it not been for tuberculosis? In general, is creativity ever possible without the feeling of malady and dis-ease? In ancient Greece, the sick headed for an asclepeion, a healing temple to the god Asclepius, to find cure for their maladies. In the nineteenth century, it was in the sanatoria typically located in high mountains, where TB patients sought refuge and hope. There they were ordained to take plenty of rest, inhale fresh mountain air and partake proper nutrition. However, before antibiotics were invented the statistics were very grim: around seventy per cent of patients died in the sanatoria. Those who recovered were not seriously ill in the first place. This was also true for the prestigiously located Davos, where dying patients were carefully hidden in order not to ruin the reputation of the resort. Only the rich could afford a curative stay on the Alpine heights. It is worth remembering, however, as Mary Dobson put it, that “the disease hit hardest at those whose lives were blighted by poverty and poor nutrition, and worked in badly ventilated, overcrowded, cold, damp or dusty conditions.” To this day TB remains a disease of the poor and the dispossessed, the ones who are easily forgotten, unlike the high profile figures of the Romantic period.

Constance Markievicz, “Visit To A Dublin Family During Thetuberculosis Epidemic”

The first sanatorium was built in Davos by Alexander Spengler, who also invented the famous “corpse rest” (Kadaverruhe in German).

Patients were advised to swaddle in warm blankets and spend hours inhaling ice cold mountain air under the beams of the sun.  This procedure was beautifully and memorably described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain. Its hero Hans Castorp comes to Davos “only for two weeks” to visit his cousin, but ends up staying in the sanatorium for seven years after he is also diagnosed with consumption. Thus begins his journey of self-discovery, which leads him to the understanding that to be truly and deeply human is to be frail, to suffer and always remember about death. Or as one of the characters puts it, “to be human was to be ill.” In his Reader’s Guide to Mann’s novel, Rodney Symington quotes the echoing famous words from Beckett’s Endgame: “You’re on earth; there’s no cure for that.” A different sort of consciousness opens with such a realization: one aware of things infinite and ultimate – a mythical understanding of life. The title of the novel came from a passage in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: “Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us” (quoted after Symington). Like the World Tree, the magic mountain has its roots planted in the dark earth while its branches reach high to the sky.

Hans Castorp was a conventional young man, a member of the affluent bourgeoisie with a robust work ethic. This conventional way of life, however, did not offer him any fulfillment:

“Hans Castorp respected work… Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life;

…

Exacting occupation dragged at his nerves, it wore him out; quite openly he confessed that he liked better to have his time free, not weighted with the leaden load of effort; lying spacious before him, not divided up by obstacles one had to grit one’s teeth and conquer, one after the other.”

Given the luxury and freedom of time in Davos, Hans Castorp flourished. In a secluded magical shrine of the Alpine valley he was simultaneously made us acutely aware of his own frail body and of his inner spirit. The infinite vistas of contemplation opened to him, accompanied by an aching, fleshy desire for a fellow convalescent – Clavdia Chauchat. In my absolute favorite passage Hans muses over the meaning of life:

“What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material – it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition. It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.

…

…the image of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote from his grasp, yet near his sense; this body, this opaquely ehitish form, giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with all its blemishes and native impurities, with its spots, pimples, discolorations, irregularities; its horny, scalelike regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls of rudimentary lanugo.”

Life came to Hans in the shape of Clavdia.

In the nineteenth century tuberculosis was called the robber of youth. In “Elgin Marbles” Keats wrote contemplatively:

“My spirit is too weak—mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.”

Joseph Severn, “Keats’s Death”

The Romantics glorified consumption, associating it with beauty (especially in women), delicate spirit and heightened artistic sensitivity. The victims were perceived as innocent and holy. Nevertheless, the gruesome truth was that the disease totally ravaged the lungs of the victims, while the sheer amount of blood coughed up was often astounding. Still, George Sand insisted that Chopin coughed “with infinite grace” while Edgar Allan Poe described his dying wife Virginia as “delicately, morbidly angelic.”

Edvard Munch, “Angel of Death”

In one of the most beautiful short stories called “The Birch Grove,” a Polish writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz gives a more realistic portrayal of the disease, yet without losing its mystical aura. There, a young consumptive man arrives in the countryside “to die.” His elder brother lives there with his young daughter, both deep in mourning after his wife’s recent death. The young man, though extremely weak and in constant pain, is greedier for life than his healthy brother. Towards the end of the story, the older brother, similarly to Hans Castorp, experiences a mystical moment of connection with all life, while standing in the birch grove in the middle of the night. The white entangled trunks remind him of feminine arms pointing upwards as if in ecstasy. This is a moment of sensual awakening, embracing life as it is in the moment. It is natural that great writers think alike, but I find it quite extraordinary that Hans Castorp experienced a very similar epiphany looking at bare arms of Clavdia Chauchat during the Walpurgis-Night ball:

“Poor Hans Castorp! He was reminded of a theory he had once held about these arms, on making their acquaintance for the first time, veiled in diaphanous gauze: that it was the gauze itself, the ‘illusion’ as he called it, which had lent them their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of these arms, these splendid members of an infected organism, an experience so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our young man no other recourse than again, with drooping heed, to whisper, soundlessly: ‘O my God!’”

A sense of approaching end must render every moment acutely and piercingly real. Looking at John Keats death mask, it is hard not to wonder whether his awareness of the imminent death was instrumental in causing his talent to flower so passionately and frenetically in the last years of his life. Perhaps in a creative individual, life and talent intensify when confronted with death. And yet a creeping feeling of waste and of tremendous loss remains, beautifully expressed by Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus (translated by Edward Snow):

“Illness was near. Already gripped by shadows,

your blood coursed darker; yet, as if only fleetingly

suspicious, it burst forth into its natural Spring.

Again and again, amid darkness and downfall,

it flared earthly. Until after terrible pounding

it stepped through the hopelessly open gate.”

Keats – death mask

Sources:

Mary Dobson, Murderous Contagion: A Human History of Disease, Kindle edition

Rodney Symington, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: A Reader’s Guide, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011

“As in the hand a sulfur match flares white
and sends out flicking tongues on every side
before it bursts into flame –: in that ring
of crowded onlookers, hot, eager, and precise
her round dance begins to dart and spread.

And all at once it is entirely flame.

With a glance she sets her hair ablaze
and whirls suddenly with daring art
her slender dress into this fiery rapture,
from which, like snakes awakened,
two naked arms uncoil, aroused and rattling.

And then: as if she felt the fire grow tight,
she gathers it all up and casts it off
disdainfully, and watches with imperious
command: it lies there raging on the ground
and still flares up and won’t surrender –.
But unwavering, assured, and with a sweet
welcoming smile she lifts her face
and stamps it out with rock-hard little feet.”

Reiner Maria Rilke, “Spanish Dancer,” translated by Edward Snow, quoted from “New Poems,” Kindle edition

Hans Rudolf Strupler, Composition in Red

Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (volume 14 of Collected Works) was completed by Jung when he was 81 and is a synthesis of his lifelong work on marrying alchemy and psychology. A central symbol of alchemy was Mercurius, which was a subject of part 5 of this series. In basic terms, Mercurius can be understood as the unconscious matrix itself, the cosmic Nous (Mind), or the spirit which appears in reality in differentiated form. The active, masculine aspect of Mercurius is Sol, the feminine and passive one – Luna (par. 109 of Mysterium Coniunctionis – all subsequent quotes comes from this book). Mercurius in Jung’s words is “a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness” (par. 109).  To manifest itself, Mercurius needs other transformative substances, sol and sulphur being vital in this equation.

Max Ernst, “Red Sun”

The sun is as ambivalent and multi-faceted as any other alchemical symbol. It was perceived as “an active substance hidden in the gold” and extracted as red tincture (par. 109). It was believed to contain an active, hot, dry and red sulphur, which is how the alchemists explained its redness. Sulphur has always been a universal attribute of the devil and infernal fires. As a chemical substance it is sharply penetrating and has an extremely pungent smell. It ignites rapidly and produces a very bright and a very hot flame. When burned, it melts to a blood-red liquid and emits a blue flame. However, chemists know that in fact it is not sulphur that can make gold red, but copper, which for alchemists was associated with Venus. This makes things interesting, since the planet Venus in its appearance as the morning star (Venus Phosphorus – “Light-Bringer) was called “Lucifer” in Latin, a name also given to the most beautiful of fallen angels. In alchemy, all symbols are light and dark in equal measure. Darkness is not the absence of light, but an entity of equal importance and endowed with a tangible substance.

Stanislaw Wyspianski, “Eos, Phosphoros, Hesperos, Helios”

The sun’s favorable effects were its generational and transformative properties, fostering growth of fruit, wine and the mineral gold in the bowels of the earth. In humans, it was said to “enkindle the inner warmth,” will and appetites; as a “vital spirit” it was believed to have “its seat in the brain and its governance in the heart” (par. 110). Alchemists called the sun “the father and begetter of all.” Sulphur was the hot and deamonic principle of life, the vital energy, the “central fire,” in short – the soul (par. 112). What Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green force drives the flower” in his magnificent classic poem was referred to as “the animating principle” by the alchemists. They believed in the universality and ubiquity of this “universal power of growth, healing, magic and prestige” (par.113). It was present in the sun above and in the plants and humans below. This supreme power was the alchemical gold, which was not the common gold (aurum vulgi), but a miraculous, incorruptible substance, “the true and indubitable treasure” (par. 113), which could only be perceived by those who can see with their mind’s eye.

Paul Klee, “Ad Marginem”

But since every alchemical substance had its shadow, so the sun was equipped with one also. Jung quotes Maier: “For what, in the end is this sun without a shadow? The same as a bell without a clapper” (par. 116). A saying of Hermes, pivotal for all alchemists, deserves to be quoted in its entirety: “Son, extract from the ray its shadow, and the corruption that arises from the mists which gather about it, befoul it and veil its light; for it is consumed by necessity and by its redness.” This admonition can be explicated in the following terms. In the first stage of the alchemical opus, the sun is obscured by the shadow. This is the Black Sun, the earthly sun, which is “an instrument in the physiological and psychological drama of return to the prima materia, the death that must be undergone if man is to get back to the original condition of the simple elements and attain the incorrupt nature of the pre-worldly paradise” (par. 117). The black sun brings about the death of the old. This putrefaction cannot be achieved without sulphur, whose role is to “corrupt man back to his first essence.” In the next stage, the reborn sun will be joined with Mercurius, but before that can happen, the sun is not only obscured by the shadow but it will also be “consumed by necessity and by its redness.” This brings sulphur back onto the stage.

Max Ernst, “Sea and Sun”

Alchemists distinguished between a red and a white sulphur. The former was the active substance of the moon, the latter was believed to be more virtuous and it was said to be the active substance of the sun. Sulphur was chthonic, corporal and earthly; it was associated with the fire breathing dragon. It was Paracelsus who referred to sulphur as the soul, which together with salt (the body) beget Mercurius. The red masculine sulphur is the fiery ferment of the soul’s hidden depths. Gerhard Dorn (quoted here after Jung) called it “the male and universal seed, …, the first part and most potent cause of all generation” (par. 136). It is a generative power that burns and consumes from within. Too much of it corrupts and weakens, bringing about evil and blackness, violence and rampant instincts, but without it there would be no impetus to life and no progress. In a concluding paragraph, Jung calls compulsion symbolized by sulphur “the great mystery of human life,” “the thwarting of our conscious will and of our reason by an inflammable element within us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth” (par. 150).

Marc Chagall, “Field of Mars”

Related posts:

Jung on Alchemy (1): The Moist and Earthly Foundation

Jung on Alchemy (2): The Mandala

Jung on Alchemy (3): Meditation and Imagination

Jung on Alchemy (4): Prima Materia – The One, Who Art All

Jung on Alchemy (5): Hermes, the Arcane Interpreter of All

Henry Farrer, Lighthouse, http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/382738

The world’s first lighthouse, the Pharos, was erected in the ancient city of Alexandria. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it turned the insignificant port of Pharos into one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. It was most probably built out of dazzlingly white limestone and around up to 600 feet (180 metres) tall. Not only was it a beacon for sea travelers but it also served as a sort of welcome centre or a shining portal for all newcomers into the magnificent city.

Mosaic in St. Mark’s basilica representing the saint arriving in Alexandria, showing the Pharos Lighthouse

It is quite easy to see why lighthouses stir our romantic core. They are a stark image – tall, austere towers which are nevertheless comforting as they are there to guide mariners to a safe harbor through treacherous waters. The symbolism of any tower is dual at its core: on the one hand it is phallic, mighty, erect, denoting power and spirit reaching from the earth to the heavens. On the other hand, it is feminine, reminiscent of an enclosed area, a walled sanctuary, and a safe haven. The Tower of Ivory was one of the names given to the Virgin Mary in her protective role of offering refuge and comfort.

The lighthouse may be seen as symbolic of individual consciousness, which kindles “a light in the darkness of mere being,” as Jung famously put it in his memoirs. He also wrote these words of warning in Psychology and Alchemy:

“The meeting between the … individual consciousness and the vast expanse of the collective unconscious is dangerous, because the unconscious has a decidedly disintegrating effect on consciousness.”

photo via http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/masterworks-mellon-n09245/lot.2.html

Lighthouses used to be built near the most dangerous waters, only after a plethora of horrific sea disasters had taken place in the area. As such, they brilliantly symbolize the perils of individuation – a constant danger of being swallowed by the unconscious forces beyond our control. In a fascinating article, Nathaniel Rich of The New York Review of Books, compares these “brilliant beacons” to “cenotaphs, marking deathtraps that for centuries devoured mariners along the continent’s coasts.” Granted, thousands of lives were saved thanks to lighthouses, but at the same time their keepers were in constant mortal danger, living in utter and often desperate isolation.  As Jung wrote:

“By becoming conscious, the individual is threatened more and more with isolation, which is nevertheless the sine qua non of conscious differentiation.”

The Eddystone Lighthouse, via http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-eddystone-lighthouse-t04820

Lighthouse keepers often paid a high price for performing an invaluable service to the collective. Specific examples of their plight mentioned by Rich are quite eye-opening. A lot of lighthouses burnt because the whale oil used to fuel the lighthouse fire at the beginnings of the twentieth century was highly combustible. Furthermore,

“the keeper’s life was not at all quiet. During periods of low visibility, keepers had to sound fog signals, which depending on the era might involve blasting canons, shooting guns, ringing bells, or blowing horns.

…

Keepers not only had to maintain the light and fog signals but also clean the lens, trim the lantern wicks, and scrub the walls, floors, windows, balconies, and railings, inside and outside. The many brass fixtures and appliances had to be polished diligently, a job that of itself was enough to drive keepers to madness… Inspectors appeared without warning wearing white gloves…”

The job of the lighthouse keeper evidently required diligence, vigilance and a fair amount of drudgery. Like priestesses of Vesta tending the sacred fire, he or she had to maintain focus on purity. Harold Bayley in The Lost Language of Symbolism, claims that the words fire and sphere are derived from the same root. Both are the most ancient symbols of divinity understood as the primeval cause of the universe as well as the inner spark of the individual soul. Heraclitus wrote this on fire: “That which always was and is, and will be everlasting fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away.” Keeping the fire ablaze while living on the edge of society, bearing loneliness as a price paid for individuation, is the main task of the (symbolically understood) lighthouse keeper.

Phare d’Alexandrie (Barclay), via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phare_d%27Alexandrie_(Barclay).jpg

I.“Thus the fire began to work upon the air and brought forth Sulphur. Then the air began to work upon the water and brought forth Mercurius. The water began to work upon the earth and brought forth Salt. But the earth, having nothing to work upon, brought forth nothing, so the product remained within it. Therefore only three principles were produced, and the earth became the nurse and matrix of the others. From these three principles were produced male and female, the male obviously from Sulphur and Mercurius, and the female from Mercurius and Salt. Together they bring forth the “incorruptible One,” the quinta essentia…”

Anonymous alchemical treatise “De sulphure” (quoted by Jung in “Mysterium Coniunctionis”)

II.“Yet the real carrier of life is the individual. He alone feels happiness, he alone has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatever. The masses and the state have nothing of the kind. Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses.”

C.G. Jung, “Mysterium Coniunctionis”

III.

“This salt
in the salt cellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won’t
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a
broken
v oice,
a mournful
song.

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food.
Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste infinitude.”

Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Salt”

Wieliczka salt mine, crystal chandelier (via Wikipedia)

In the early sixteenth-century England the Church strictly controlled the access to God’s word by forbidding translating the Bible into English. The scholar William Tyndale defied the ban, working ceaselessly on his translations of the Holy Book right until his cruel death by execution. In his Adventure of English, Melvyn Bragg sings the praises of the “soaringly poetic” and yet “always earthed” English of Tyndale’s Gospels. Those rhythmically beautiful English words, with their “instant memorability and authority” shook the foundations of the church establishment. The famous verses from the Gospel of St Matthew still sound beautiful in Old English:

“Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome off heven.

Blessed are they that morne: for they shal be comforted.

Blessed are the meke: for they shall inherit the erth.

Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes: for they shal be filled

Blessed are the mercifull: for they shall obteyne mercy.

Blessed are the pure in herte: for they shall se God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shal be called the chyldren of God.

Blessed are they which suffre persecucion for rightwenes sake: for theirs ys the kyngdome off heven.

Blessed are ye when men shall reuyle you and persecute you and shall falsly say all manner of yvell saynges against you ffor my sake.

Reioyce and be glad for greate is youre rewarde in heven.

For so persecuted they the prophets which were before youre dayes.

Ye are the salt of the erthe.”

Alchemists viewed salt as a paradoxical, arcane substance, which in itself had corruption and protection against it. Like the alchemical salt, the language of Tyndale corroded the establishment, while simultaneously crystallizing the newly risen power of the individual, who was now able to get acquainted with the Holy Book without the church’s mediation.

Paracelsus equated Sal (salt) with the soul, “the stable basis of life, its earth, ground, body.” Jung offered many enlightening quotes from the alchemist Vigenerus, who saw salt as “that virginal and pure earth which is contained in the centre of all composite elementals, or in the depths of the same.” Hillman calls salt “the ground of subjectivity” and “felt experience.” While the alchemical sulphur is masculine and solar, salt is feminine and lunar. It deals with life, the individual soul embodied in the concrete and the material. Thanks to salt, says Hillman,

“we descend into the experiential component of this body – its blood, sweat, tears, and urine – to find our salt. … salt is the mineral, impersonal, objective ground of personal experience making experience possible.

…

Salt is soluble. Weeping, bleeding, sweating, urinating bring salt out of its interior underground mines. It appears in our moistures, which are the flow of salt to the surface. “During the work the salt assumes the appearance of blood” …  Moments of dissolution are not mere collapses; they release a sense of personal human value from the encrustations of habit. “I, too, am a human being worth my salt” – hence my blood, sweat, and tears.

Pain implicates us at once in body, and psychic pain in psychic body. We are always subjected to pain, so that events that hurt, like childhood traumas, abuse, and rape, force our subjectivity upon us. These events seem in memory to be more real than any others because they carry the force of subjective reality.

These traumatic events initiate in the soul a sense of its embodiment as a vulnerable experiencing subject.”

Wieliczka salt mine, old corridor, via Wikipedia

Too much salt, however, may bring about fixation on past wounds – the immobile bitterness of Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt.

Kent Monkman, “Lot’s Wife”

The right amount of salt denotes wit (cum grano salis), emotional, erotic participation and excitement, which arouses passion and desire. Hence the Ancient Romans called a man in love “salax” (modern English still uses the word “salacious” with a similar meaning). All meanings of the alchemical salt seem to revolve around the feminine, the earthy, the body (including the emotional body), the feeling nature, the moistness of being. The ancients valued salt so much that they associated it with fecundity, and by extension with money and wealth (the word “salary” is derived from “salt”). Jones explains (quoting Schneider):

“The sea was unquestionably the fructifying, creative element. … the offspring of sea creatures are to be counted by thousands and hundreds of thousands. This was all the more easily ascribed to the salt of the sea, since other observations believed to have been made were connected with it.”

For the Egyptians, salt guaranteed rebirth. Mummies were washed and preserved with the use of a brine solution called natron, which was perceived as birth-fluid, or as Barbara Walker puts it, “the Mother’s regenerative blood.” Natron was also used by the Egyptians as a beautifying, cleansing product, as a way to get rid of toxins and cleanse the household of vermin, as well as for spiritual purification. In ancient Rome, it was the Vestal virgins who were responsible for handling salt in sacrificial religious rituals. As Hillman wrote,

“The inherent capability of salt to crystallize its own essence is what I would call the inherent virginity of salt. By virginity here I mean the self-same, self-enclosed devotion to purity.”

Alchemists were not interested in the common salt, but in what they called Sal Sapientiae (salt of wisdom). On the one hand, salt and sulphur were viewed as opposing substances, as it was believed that “Sal inflicts on Sulphur an incurable wound.” (Jung) However, salt, the feminine and lunar principle, needed the solar and masculine ardour of sulphur to avoid the risk of rigidity and puritanism. When does the soul need salt? asks Hillman:

“There is another time and place for salt: when the soul needs earthing. When dreams and events do not feel real enough, when the uses of the world taste stale, flat and unprofitable, when we feel uncomfortable in community and have lost our personal ‘me-ness’ – weak, alienated, drifting – then the soul needs salt.

We mistake our medicine at times and reach for sulfur: action, false extraversion, trying harder. However, the move toward the macrocosm may first have to go back toward the microcosm, so that the world can be experienced and not merely joined with and acted upon as an abstract field. World must become earth; and this move from world as idea to tangible presence requires salt.

This effect of salt proceeds from its own fervor, a fervor of fixity that can be distinguished from the fervor of sulfuric enthusiasm and its manic boil of action, as well as from the fervor of mercury and its effervescent volatility.

…

When we sit still and sweat it out, we are stabilizing and adding salt to the solution so that it becomes a genuine one. Problems seem not to go away until they have first been thoroughly received.”

Wieliczka salt mine lake

Sources:

James Hillman, “Salt,” chapter in Alchemical Psychology

Ernest Jones, “The symbolic significance of salt in folklore and superstition”

C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

Barbara G. Walker, Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets